What better place to start in a course that revolves around the genre of horror than with a week of madness? In general, madness is one of my favorite themes to explore and see explored. The catharsis and unabashed wildness of madness is something that captivates me. I am drawn in by the intrigue that authors of tales about madness weave into the fabric of the story. What caused it? To what end does it serve? Can it happen to me? I certainly enjoy thinking about it. There are many books in this course that involve a character being shaken by powers out of their control, but this first week I focused in on a few stories with that aspect as the crux.
Firstly, I read my weekly H.P. Lovecraft tale: At the Mountains of Madness. Madness: right there in the title. It is one of my favorite stories, and I did not mind having a chance to study its pages again. It is a story that is framed as a cautionary tale in first person perspective by William Dyer, a professor of geology at the fictional (yet often referred to in the works of Lovecraft) Miskatonic University. The story is his account of a scientific expedition to Antarctica with a group of teachers and students, and it serves as a warning to a group that is planning another expedition. Dyer tells the full, never before head tale of the full expedition, and of his voyage into an ancient city once inhabited by an eldritch race, accompanied only by a bright student by the name of Danforth.
The interesting part of this tale is that no one actually goes full on mad. Save potentially for Danforth, though he is described only as permanently traumatized and not fully screaming in a straight jacket. Instead, this story does a great job of describing a sinister, haunting environment that could indeed drive a lesser man to madness. The two men, being scientists, were driven deeper and deeper into a seemingly (and very well described) alien city by a feverish curiosity. A mounting dread does grow in them, however, and on many occasions, Dyer draws a comparison of the mountains and the city to a hellish place called the Plateau of Leng as described in the (fictional) Necronomicon. Eventually, the two do encounter a nightmarish being known as a “shoggoth,” described as a “terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us.” Certainly enough to drive someone mad, i.e. Danforth.
This story ties in nicely with next week’s theme of cosmicism, or the dread of the unknown, and the theory that humans are insignificant in the grand scheme of the history of the universe: a realization that often drives a character to madness. The discovery of an ancient civilization that ruled the earth before humans, a terrifying monster, and evidence of eldritch history that deems humans powerless is utterly terrifying, cosmic, and, dare I say it, maddening.
The second book that I read this week was called Uzumaki by Japanese horror artist and author, Junji Ito. While technically Uzumaki is a graphic novel, it was also 700 pages long, and packed with crazy people and disturbing imagery. Uzumaki means “spiral” in English, which makes a lot of sense based on the content of the book. The plot of Uzumaki revolves around the small (fictional) seaside town of Kurozo-cho being “contaminated by spirals,” as said many times by co-protagonist Shuichi Saito. Throughout the novel, Shuichi and his girlfriend, Kirie Goshima (whose perspective we are following) are subjected to numerous disturbing events, all centered around the spiral shape. From beginning to end of this novel, Shuichi is losing his mind trying to convince Kirie to move out of town with him. After each gut churning horror, Shuichi becomes more convinced that the town itself is cursed, while Kirie is willing to chalk it all up to a bunch of odd coincidences. Ultimately, things go way off the rails, no one can leave town, and everybody ends up dead, and contorted together in a giant tangle under Dragonfly Pond at the center of town.
This story is a fantastic study in madness, that also ties in extraordinarily well with several of my other themes this quarter. There’s a sinister unseen force, insects, obsession, and the list goes on. However, I believe that this book is mostly a good study in insanity. Over the course of the whole novel, Shuichi is losing his mind trying to tell other people (mainly his girlfriend) that the town is cursed and that they are all going mad. He reaches a point towards the end where he ends up doomed like the rest of the town because he wouldn’t leave Kirie to die. He doesn’t do much speaking towards the end, and can only manage to keep muttering to himself that the whole town is going mad. In fact, he was right all along till the bitter end. Nobody would listen to him, and everybody ends up going crazy in various grotesque ways. Everyone in the town is completely dehumanized.
The film that I watched this week was John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, which borrows heavily from H.P. Lovecraft’s stories. There are small nods to his work throughout the movie, most noticeably in the form of the main subject being the disappearance of a prominent horror writer that writes stories that are strikingly similar to the ones written by Lovecraft.
The movie starts with the main character, a freelance insurance investigator, in a psychiatric hospital. In the wake of a disaster, a doctor enters and the insurance investigator tells the story. He was hired to find the missing horror author, as his disappearance came right before he was supposed to release a highly anticipated book called In the Mouth of Madness. The trail leads the investigator to the fictional town of Hobb’s End. Long story short, Hobb’s End was a town created by the author, he’s hiding in the big scary church working on the novel, and (in a very meta moment) it is revealed that what the author writes becomes reality, he is being told what to write by unknown evil entities, and the investigator is the main character of this new novel. The rest of the movie, the investigator tries to fight against the will of the author which is to deliver the completed story to the publisher. Ultimately, he fails since he himself is a fabrication that must do what is written. Also, the new book drives the reader insane when they read it, and there is a movie version being released to reach non-readers. In the end, nobody listened to the investigator when he tried to tell them what was happening, and he stumbles out of the psych ward into a world devoid of people. He walks into a theater and watches scenes from earlier in the movie. He breaks into laughter and the movie ends. Fascinating.
I did not have a hard time this week coming up with song ideas based on these novels. They gave me a pretty good idea of the elements that go into making a madness theme. Occurrences that seem dreamlike and unreal. Disturbing images. High tension and urgency combined with sudden mood changes. All things I was confident I could adapt into a song, and I already have. I tried to make the song incredibly dissonant in order to evoke the feeling of discomfort often caused by disturbing imagery. I tried to make the pace fast yet disjointed to account for urgency, and I incorporated different melody lines with no transitions to change moods abruptly. I based the lyrics off of imagery that is unreal and not as it should be. Most notably, I borrowed the concept of being the only person with important information that nobody will listen to from all three stories by making my hook simply, “why won’t anybody listen to me.” I had a lot of fun writing this particular song, and I hope that others will enjoy my work as much as I enjoy my own each week. After all, they do say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.